Late March, Early April 2013

Becca and I had been curious about the Hare Krishna Spring Celebration for years before Garit and Lorena invited us to go. It's a beautiful building out in the middle of nowhere Spanish Fork UT.

You can't blame the Hare Krishnas for taking advantage of their biggest opportunity to present their ideas to the public. They had one presentation set up with a bunch of quotes from LDS leaders talking about taking care earth's creatures and eating meat sparingly.

Garit said that this is the Hare Krishnas' one and only fundraiser of the year. The attraction? Having a place where people can throw colorful chalk at complete strangers. See that cloud in the picture above? You saw that every hour on the hour. People walked down the hill a ways and threw colored chalk, which they purchased at the event.

 We had fun participating as well.

While the major chalk throwing happened every hour on the hour people would often throw dust at strangers as they passed each other in the crowds.

I think I kind of look as though I should be an old Scottish warrior here.

We were glad Garit and Lorena found out about when this was and invited us to come along.

Easter Sunday was great. In Church, the Primary kids sang a song, I sang a solo Woman, Why Weepest Thou? (you can hear a sample of the song here) and directed the choir in singing Did You See Him in the Garden?. Combined with fabulous speakers I would say that the Easter Program was a wonderful success. People were talking about it in the ward even weeks later.

Becca made a traditional Slavic Easter dessert and absolutely nailed it! It's essentially a no bake cheese cake. You may be wondering about the XB on the cake. In Russian, you wish someone a happy Easter by saying Христос bоскрес (Christ is risen)! The X is the first letter in their word for Christ and the B is the first letter in their word for risen.

We spent a whirl-wind week in California with Mariah and Xavier. It would have been nice to coordinate a bit better to have visited more people. We hadn't seen the kids in quite a while and the date of our vacation got changed so we didn't do much planning until right before we left. We mainly slept in Modesto and spent almost all of our time elsewhere. The picture above is at Mickey Grove Park in Lodi.

We spent the night with Aunt Debbie and then went to Point Lobos on the coast.

We were happy Debbie and Mel came along.

 Both Mariah and Xavier were little monkeys!

Our trip coincided with General Conference and so we all went to the stake center on El Vista Ave. in Modesto. For being eight and five, both kids behaved very, very well.

We drove down to Atwater after the afternoon session so I could attend the Priesthood Session with Grandpa.

Mariah really wanted to go on the squirt gun boats at Boomers. The staff thought we were crazy because it was at the end of the day and the temperature was below 80 degrees. As you can see, Mariah had a blast!

Xavier was just a little too short to drive the kiddie carts by himself so we went on the big ones together. Lots of fun!

Here's another picture of Xavier and Becca on a ride at the park in Lodi.

Becca and I saw this building on an episode of Monk years ago and wondered where in San Francisco it was. When we passed it by chance I decided to stop and look around.

We later went to another park where my friend Cameron and I visited years ago for a Norwegian celebration. What was the best part? Getting soaked in the waves of course!

This is now probably our best family picture.